We all sit down too much. We sit at work, we sit at movies, we sit on our couch at night, and we sit down to play our favorite video games.
And it’s slowly killing us.
Our bodies and brains were not meant to sit for extended periods of time. We were made to walk, run, and to be active most of the day as we hunted, gathered, and mated (or tried to). Modern society has automated most of the strenuous activities, so much so that we “fake it” by running on a treadmill or lifting weights at the gym for 30 – 60 minutes a few days a week. In modern life we can get by without ever breaking a sweat if we want to.
It’s easy to imagine that the less we use our body, the longer it will last because we won’t be putting wear and tear on it. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. This infographic from the Washington Post goes into the scary details:
And that’s why room-scale VR is so important. The HTC Vive is already room-scale and Oculus today announced their Guardian system that will allow room-scale once the Touch controllers and secondary camera are released later this year. Other companies are working on room-scale, or even world-scale, like Intel’s Project Alloy and Qualcomm’s VR820, and we can only guess what Google is up to with their next versions of Android VR.
Just the simple act of standing up while playing games, learning about history, or being immersed in your favorite band’s new VR music video will help you avoid the dangers that chairs hide. The next level of VR fitness activities and devices may even make you more healthy and fit than you ever have been before.
But first… just stand up.
